Social Media Mission Control

Sold on the idea that they absolutely just have to be involved in Twitter, Facebook and probably Foursquare at this point, businesses still fail miserably when it comes to social media. It's not really their fault. I blame the clowns at the agencies who made them believe how important it was in the first place.

I tweeted recently about my disappointment with my insurance company - by name. (Hint: You're not really in good hands with them.) Within a day and a half, which is a long-ass time in social media, I got a reply on Twitter, though I'm sure they thought they were being quite timely. It was a very bland and corporatey response, something to the effect of, "Sorry. How can we help?" But the truth is, that's all they could say. Unfortunately, there is nothing they can actually do to help and they know that. They sent an adjuster out to the house who denied my claim, so I said they sucked on Twitter. Is their Twitter Response Team going to overrule the adjuster? Of course not. They responded just for the sake of responding, to avoid looking like an uncaring corporate entity with little regard for their customers' petty complaints. They call it Brand Reputation Management, which is a nice way of saying "Spray the Dog Shit with Lysol." It will stop stinking for a little while and maybe people will walk through the room and not notice it. Eventually it will dry up and stop stinking altogether.

I'm sure there are others out there who griped about an airline and maybe got a few free miles out of the exchange, but those cases are rare. Personally, I'd rather go back to the days (two years ago) when companies just let the complaints happen, not worried what one little tweet was going to do to their brand. One little tweet won't do shit to your brand, unless it reflects a huge and catastrophic fuck-up on your company's part, like maybe you lost a child on one of your airplanes. You got sold on "Being in a Conversation" with your customers, which is utter bullshit. You may now appear to be in a conversation, but you don't give a rat's ass anymore than you ever did. There are other insurance companies, but this one gambles that I will probably not go to the trouble of switching to another just because I have to pay for my own claim now. They're probably right, but their fake caring response had nothing to do with that. They should stop worrying about it and stop pretending to care.

You're Doing it Wrong!

The other day I compared the two presidential candidate’s logos. The post got a bit of traction from Copyranter and Discourse.net. In my analysis of McCain's logo was this passage: Then, he adorns the star with what could be considered wings, reminding us that he was a pilot, a pilot who graduated fifth to last in his class at Annapolis, not usually a place from which the Navy selects its flight school candidates.

That's all the geniuses at AviationSchools needed.

"Ah-ha! Someone is talking about flight school! Time to paste a random, stupid comment on that blog and send them to my random, stupid link farm for aviation schools!"

The comment, if you can even call it that, left TWICE, reads: "Online Aviation Training Directory has one of the largest selections of flight schools and aviation training schools online. New flight schools and aviation resources added weekly."

The commenter, posting under the name "Flying Lessons," is also the proud owner of PlanetMace, your one stop shop for pepper-spray and stun-guns.

This is social media, friends. Or this is what it's becoming. This guy finds "flight school" in a post about John McCain's logo and assumes my readers want to visit his stupid link farm for aviation schools. Even if no one ever goes to that site through the comments of the original post, at the least his stupid link farm now has an inbound link from my site and countless others, surely, where he has pasted his URL in a very irrelevant way.

This is not a "conversation." This is SPAM. It's maddening and it's doomed to fail.

If you are going to use blogs as a place to get the word out about your business, it will require real thought— actual words from your head typed relevantly to the post— in relevant places.

Quit being carnival barkers and midway hawkers. You're ruining it for everyone else. You're also not helping your business.

Not What We Had In Mind

Your Company Blog Bites

But fret not, corporate honchos interested in tapping into The Conversation; Bossman's team of Rockstar Change Agents are here to push that envelope.

If you click it, it will grow.

Cutting off the Conversation

Here’s the formula for the new New Media website.

Create an idea surrounding user generated content. Cite YouTube as your proof that this will work. Make a logo. Put the word “beta” under the logo. Get together an experienced management team. Gather venture capital and a board of advisors. Launch with as much press as you can garner, “seed” comments on forums and blogs, monitor buzz and make comments on blogs where people are badmouthing you.

Bill posted about ExpoTV, which I had to see. ExpoTV contains what it calls "short, unbiased, consumer-generated videos of products and services." Here we see Hunted339 talking about Axe Bodyspray. Hunted339 tells us, “This smells soooooo good.” Awesome testimonial, Hunted339. I'm on my way to CVS now for a case of it.

Prediction for ExpoTV: You will all be looking for jobs soon and your investors will wonder where they went wrong. I can tell you. With the promise of paying your video uploaders “up to $10,” you are encouraging less than honest reviews of products. What kind of money can I make if I get on your site and say, “This Ford has been nothing but hassles from day one, and I’ll never buy another Ford again.”? My guess is not much. Why am I going to believe some paid amateur reviewing a product? (And reviewing it very poorly.) I know, I know. It's still in "beta." You've got some "issues" to work through "going forward," but you are "confident" that "this model" will succeed as you help "empower" consumers.

Here's the only part you got right: people love to see themselves on TV. They will upload videos of themselves. And they will scramble like hungry squirrels if you hang a dollar in front of them for that video.

This is not where advertising is heading – and if it is, we’re closer to Idiocracy than I thought.

Prediction: A defender of ExpoTV will make a comment on this post. That’s part of the new New Media. If they don’t, expect that venture capital to dry up even faster.

Drinking The Kool-Aid - But Not Catching a Buzz

On Friday, Copyranter did me the kindness of linking to a story here at Where’s My Jetpack? (Good for a huge spike in traffic, with that link being the leading source of traffic over the weekend – and likely through this week.) In the comments section of that post, I thanked him, as did Mr. William Green of Make the Logo Bigger. Bill pointed out that Copyranter “ranks higher than me on every blog ranking list he doesn’t want to be on.”

Copyranter has no labels, no Technorati tags, no digg icons and he doesn’t Twitter. He’s not asking you to Stumble Upon him or mark him as del.icio.us. There’s no way for you to email his stories to your friends from his site. He steadfastly refuses to keep a blog roll, even though he’s known to make the rounds as a commenter here and there. The most he offers his visitors is a Feedburner link.

So what makes Copyranter’s blog have a Technorati ranking of 14,117 and an Authority of 297? (Those numbers, for those of us who watch them, are mockingly higher than many blogs with every social media icon known to man cluttering up the end of every post.)

Say it with me, class…CONTENT.

That’s not to diminish the value of all those social media tags and widgets, and if Copyranter were to employ them, he could probably write a book, sell it online, and retire in wealth and peace, free to toss the Plastic Flatball™ with his girlfriend in the park. But any book he wrote would only be a bestseller because of its content.

Content is still king. For all the attempts by some to make their blogs rack up huge traffic numbers and links from other blogs, it’s surprising how many of them have so few comments under the posts. Why? Likely nobody cares about what was written.

I’ve had the opportunity to help clients set up blogs, and I know many of you are engaging in the same practice. But I honestly fear for the livelihood of those blogs. Few are participating in them at best. And no one’s reading them at worst. Maybe it’s a lack of transparency. Maybe it’s already a backlash on the part of the audience, small though it is. It is easy to distrust a corporate blog, unless that corporate blog is in some way compelling by its content.

You hired a new employee? Woo-hoo! You’re speaking at a conference? Yay you! You landed a new piece of business? Awesome. You'd be better off to save that news for your Sunday afternoon call to your mom, so you can hear her say, "We're so proud of you." Or issue a press release no one is going to read.

I want you to tell me something new, something refreshing, something newsworthy or something funny. I want you to be an authority. I want you to have an opinion. I want to see you push the bounds of corporate communications and tell me how you, as the high-powered and well-known CEO of Acme, Inc., think the San Diego Chargers made a HUGE mistake in firing Marty Schottenheimer. (You do have a personal life. Your customers and prospects can benefit from seeing your humanity.) I want you to throw open the curtain and say, “People are complaining about our new rollout, Product X. Some have outright called it 'a piece of shit.' We’re working to resolve some of the obvious problems, but I invite those people who are dissatisfied to please comment here on my blog and see if together we can resolve your issues.”

Another problem with corporate blogs is frequency. If you’re posting once a week or less, just quit now. You need to keep it up. And get out there and comment on other blogs if you ever hope to see a visitor who didn’t just find you by accident. And by all means, do not engage in fake conversations with yourself, commenting anonymously on your own blog just so you can have some comments.

The Age of Conversation is very real, and I’ve made virtual friends (even met one) out here within this Series of Tubes. I’ve found voices and opinions I love to listen to and converse with in the year this blog has been active. The blog is a powerful and fun tool. (I’m not talking about MySpace, Facebook or Second Life yet. That’s a whole different post.)

Blogging isn’t going anywhere, but it has yet to be tapped effectively by those who seek to make it a means of “engaging the consumer.”